


Per Aspera Ad Mare

by callmedok



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, Sunless Sea
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Angst, Canon-Typical Behavior, Drinking, Drinking & Talking, Eventual Fluff, M/M, POV Male Character, POV Second Person, Past Relationship(s), Prisoner's Honey (Fallen London), Recurring Dreams: Death by Water (Fallen London), Route: Wolfstack Docks (Fallen London), The Author Regrets Nothing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:35:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24502477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callmedok/pseuds/callmedok
Summary: Bertie Wilmarth is an enquirer turned pickpocket with a mess of a past, Richard Melville a zee-captain with no tether to the Bazaar proper. A chance meeting at Wolfstack Docks means a new case to pursue, and an entanglement with long reaching effects.
Relationships: Player (Fallen London)/Original Male Character(s), Player (Fallen London)/Zee-Captain(s) (Sunless Sea)
Kudos: 2





	Per Aspera Ad Mare

**Author's Note:**

> I joined Fallen London about a month ago now, month and a half at most, and this just... kind of happened? So all the canon details are from my own playthrough so far, fair warning for spoilers and the like. I have played Sunless Sea once, and I wanted to keep my first zee captain alive somewhere, if only in fiction. So with that out of the way, delicious friends, enjoy!
> 
> Title comes from a riff on per aspera ad astra, through hardship the stars. Per aspera ad mare is a rough guess for 'through hardship the sea'.

It smells like rain, your first night out of New Newgate.

The fog is cruel and unmerciful as it leaves your rags soggy and clinging, and you take to skulking along the outskirts of Ladybones Road. You take whatever jobs you can, tuck yourself smaller and smaller into the alleyways, until you successfully convince a woman to rent to you for a while. It’s nothing spectacular but it’s a place to keep your head dry, to house your paltry belonging you’ve managed to scrape together.

For a while, you let your memories of Above slip form your mind. You track down the Honey-Addled Detective with the kind of determination that you once scoured books, rifled through papers with pen in hand. Once upon a time you had sheathes of notes, the kind of pride that had you holding your head high, and now you must claw your way back up again. You collect information, shuffle away what you can, and listen to every scrap of conversation within reach.

You grind yourself down, weary and burned out as you chase down the missing devil, drive him away without his dancehall girl because of a slipped word, you shatter the Comtessa because in the moment all that’s there is fear, and-

With Veilgarden and the Singing Mandrake comes old memories.

The Struggling Artist has a head full of golden curls slicked back neatly, the worn hems and shiny elbows of someone fallen on hard times. It’s the same worn hems and shiny elbows of your own morning suit, the same curls your lover had albeit lighter. The Struggling Artists laughs, and for a moment all you can think of is the Surface, the sight of the sun. For the first time in days since you’ve escaped New Newgate, something soft and warm flutters in your chest.

Infatuation comes easily, and you’d like to think its love. Like to hold to your heart fondly the sight of the Artist’s flushed cheeks when you present him with a new paint, a bouquet of flowers because some days you feel like your heart is something to give again. Something you can share, and know it’s returned in kind.

It’s the hardest thing in the world to let him go, but you do it anyways. The Struggling Artist deserves the world, and right now you are still skulking from shadow to shadow, barely managing to rent a room as you promise the woman in charge that yes, miss, the payment will be on time, yes, I swear.

You keep going afterwards, because you don’t know what else to do. You go between Ladybones Road and Spite and the surrounding places frequently, carving out a nice groove for yourself as an enquirer. A pursuer of the mysterious, a purloiner of pockets and secrets, you have a name written in four secret alphabets and another whispered in darkness. On the Surface you were softer, kinder even, but you’re tired of waking up with mold creeping up the walls, keeping anything important on you where you once could sprawl and stretch. If you sprawl and stretch right now, you can touch all four walls easily. The fear of death nips at your heels, and it’s better to actively court chance than to have it forced upon you by outside means.

Somehow, once your name is held in better regard and your cases are becoming easier to grasp, you secure the key to a room above a bookshop. It’s quiet, private, a lovely place for contemplation and the acquiring of secrets. The Neath is still a strange beast you’re coming to grips with, adjusting yourself to a newer harsher world, but you’ve found some degree of solid ground. You’ve managed to ingratiate yourself with the police, quietly smothering the fear that the crime you were framed for reaches even down here.

(All you ever wanted was to clear your lover’s name, that’s all, that’s _all_ -)

Your lover somehow, d___nably somehow, manages to come to the Neath. It is the same day you’ve attended a lecture at the Brass Embassy out of curiosity, only to find your stomach twisting in knots and bile rising in your throat. You are so terrified that you are no longer the man he loved, that by some horrible trick your soul has already been plucked from your chest. You beg him to leave, to do anything except stay. “I can’t watch you rot,” You breathe against the fabric of his coat, face buried in his shoulder, hands bunched up in his vest.

You bought him that vest, dark forest green, because it made his eyes look so vast and endless. You have spent years previously by his side and he by yours. Nights spent with your fingers combing through his dark curls, soft conversations, chasing down whatever evidence you could get as you matched step for step. You have spent years loving him, and he, you. You cannot watch him be consumed by the Neath, even as you feel yourself being eaten away.

He kisses you one last time before he leaves, calloused fingertips brushing your cheek. His mustache brushes against yours, and you hate the tears in your eyes but can’t prevent them from flowing anyway. “Forgive me,” you say, and he replies “I already have.” You’re not soulless, still intact to be potentially bought another day, but you wouldn’t be surprised if someone cracked open your chest and found it glaringly empty after watching him walk away.

You have never hated yourself more than in that moment, lingering to watch the dirigibles pass overhead. You can’t tell which one it is that takes him away, but another one seems to be placing stars in the cavern above you. It’s distraction enough from the hollow feeling in your chest, and you try to drown it out by going to the Singing Mandrake.

All the jokes and critiques and bawdy stories feel like ashes in your mouth, but it means you have wine to ply your informers with, business to see through. You can’t drown in your sorrows if you’re drowning in business instead.

You dream of drowning too, of being adrift on a ship with no one else aboard. There is neither wind nor light, nothing but the harsh burning glow of a lamp slowly stuttering out. Whenever your dreams are not raw nightmares shifting and changing in some grotesque mess of loose understanding, it is death by drowning, or watching your lover leave for the last time.

The closest you ever get to the water is through trips to the Medusa’s Head and even then, you tread over the bridge carefully. You avoid the gaze of the Cheery Man, remembering how you sent the Last Constable abroad, and distract yourself with more tangible matters. The taste of blood in your mouth is headier than the occasional cup of mushroom wine, something horrifically _real_ that forces you to focus, to sharpen yourself. It’s enough to help you forget for a while, every time you visit. Rostygold lines your pockets every night you have sore knuckles, shards of glim in the day when you take writing commissions in Veilgarden.

Your enquirer pursuits are limping along, slowly strangled by your own distraction, but it’s fine. You make enough for rent, enough to tuck away for trouble, and it could be enough. Checking in on the Urchin that lurks upon your roof, idle philosophical discussions with the Loquacious Vicar when you have the time, it’s enough for distraction. It’s enough to keep yourself from becoming entangled with the Brass Embassy, chasing too far into the Bazaar when you still feel on unsteady feet.

You fill your hours doing everything you can besides standing still and thinking, and it’s better than the alternatives you can see before you. Good enquirers can roost and mull things over as long as they need, but- Well, you aren’t the best enquirer are you, even if your watchfulness is keen? Something slips your mind by accident, a phrase muddied from lack of sleep, your eyes not as sharp after a night of squinting at papers. Dalliances with a Honey-Sipping Jewel Thief are honey-tinged, leave a cloying taste in your mouth, and while you enjoy walks in an imagined garden the false light makes you ache-

You keep moving forward despite it all, because that’s all you are sure of in the Neath. The power to act lies majorly in your own hands, rather than under the gaze of the universe at large.

You find your way to Wolfstack Docks eventually, though even you yourself are not sure how this night comes to pass. Life is a strange beast anyways, stranger still in the Neath, and you go where you feel tugged. You want to be surrounded by people, potentially find a bit of work on the side. You just want to _be_ for a while, with the potential of a spot of work.

You duck into the Blind Helmsman, because according to your connection in Spite there might be some work requiring a… delicate touch. On the other hand, murmurs at the Medusa’s Head say that you could earn a decent amount of rostygold for a bit of busy work. You’re not sure which one you would prefer more, and you’re still mulling over your options when your eyes alight on a rowdy group near the bar.

Melville is an enigma as a zee-captain. He’s rangy rather than muscular, stretched-out limbs and a similarly stretched-out face, but it suits him in a way. He laughs too loudly, a snorting honking sound, but it has charm, warmth to it. He thumps a fist against his chest as he says something to his physician, and he doesn’t sound hollow. You are not hollow either, and for some reason that means everything in the moment.

Neither of you are hollow.

You haven’t met a zee-captain yet, and it’s easy to ingratiate yourself among the zailors of the _Twilight Terminus._ You’re familiar with dock men at least, know the best jokes to make them laugh, and if Melville’s laughter feels stuck in your chest-

It’s fine, it’s something you can live with. You can live with the sight of thinning dark curls plastered to his forehead with sweat, the long line of his throat when he laughs, the rakish tilt of his hat and grin.

When you slip out of the bar you don’t expect Melville to follow, or for him to light a cigarette. There’s something to his demeanor, the tilt of his head or the cast of his shoulder, that makes you linger. “You’re a detective, right? Got that look to ya,” he says, voice pitched low with an unavoidable nasal twinge. He casts a glance to the alleyway, but it’s quiet. No skittering of rats, or the vague slight blur of cats in motion.

“Sometimes,” you demure, because it’s been a long time since you properly held that term. An enquirer is close to that, as you’ve come to gather, but terminology is loose here in the Neath. It’s interesting, actually, to hear Melville use it. He says it like there’s some weight to it, rather than being thin as well-worn paper.

(Are you the same-? Men sent adrift from the Surface, wandering and stumbling into the depths-)

Melville lets out a huff of a laugh, smoke curling from his mouth. He flicks the brim of his hat up, and his eyes are dark behind his glasses in the partial light. No unholy fire of the devils, or fish-belly gleam of the walking undead. “There’s this man, offered me gear if I’ll look on ‘em fondly later. I wanna know what I agreed to. Think you can help me out?”

You tuck your hands into the pockets of your worn morning suit, make an act out of glancing about. It’s a trick you’ve picked up in Spite, unsettle in order for soothing affirmation to hold more weight. “Perhaps. I’ll admit though, it could cost a decent echo or two if you want me to dig.” You lob the price high on purpose, curious to see if he’s fool enough to accept. Anyone who doesn’t haggle in the Neath is as rare as a memory of the Surface.

He laughs softly, takes another drag off his cigarette. His grin has an edge to it now, something sharp and biting. “Three echoes for a month of work, I’ll be back by then. Send a bat an’ everything before I dock, to get the details. Sound fair?”

You mull it over, honestly wondering if you’re willing to waste a month chasing potential shadows. However, some of your meatier cases have come from similarly humble beginnings. It will also mean you can avert your eyes from your manuscript a bit longer, for an actual reason past the fact that nothing seems to catch your thoughts. Inspiration is fleeting and ephemeral, recently.

“Fair. However, if I happen to pass while in pursuit of this case… well,” You reply, letting your words drift with an air of nonchalance. “You know how things are.” While you have few police on your side, you know at least that the rubbery men and tomb colonists might miss you. They might be the only ones who would.

Melville snorts, his fingers long and spidery as he pushes his glasses back into place. “Yeah, I do. If it gets to be too much, snag a bat an’ tell me, at least. I’ll hand off what I know later, before I leave again.” You agree to a late rendezvous, a discreet thing in Veilgarden. It’s easy to get lost in the crowds there, avoid wandering eyes, but- Well.

You always get in over your head, like the longing fool you are.

He could be any one of the handsome things flitting from bar to bar, drawing others to him like moths to a light. A secret font of naturalist information, he quickly strikes up talk of mushrooms as metaphor, bats as messengers of the beyond. His eyes shine the entire time he gestures grandly, as he describes the intricacies of the bat patterns above and the way fungus connects, like some sort of mind beneath the surface. He imitates the grasping roots by intertwining his fingers, making them wriggle and writhe, and looks so delighted as he explains.

“Call me Rich, everybody does,” Melville says jovially, flashing you another grin as you make your way through another glass of wine, and the name feels heavy in your mouth. It feels like stepping over a line to refer to him as that even privately in your own head, so you still call him Melville anyways and he laughs.

He’s always laughing, and you’re torn on whether to despise the sound as it draws attention, or treasure every second you’re graced with it.

He leaves you the notes on the labels from bottles of Greyfields 1882, a scattering of crumpled journal pages slipped into your jacket when he leans in to murmur something against your jaw. It’s the closest you’ve been to someone else in what feels like months.

“You don’t mind do you, Wilmarth? Everybody always gets skittery interruptin’ a romantic moment.” Melville says with a lazy grin, one hand steady on your shoulder as the other slides beneath your jacket, and your tongue feels tied in knots. It takes what feels like eons simply to say “…Not at all,” as if your heart won’t burst from your chest any time now.

Some part of you wonders what your heart would look like, between those lovely teeth of his. You wonder how his hands would feel against the curve of your neck, the span of your jaw, in the hollow of your spine. But you shove the wondering down, because that’s all it is, a farce. A cover to hide the passing of notes, make the supposedly dignified people walking past cast their gaze aside as he lingers against you.

There’s a flutter of something against your jaw before he pulls back, feather-light, and you’re not sure if it’s your own nerves acting up or an actual press of lips. Either way, you don’t say a thing as he pulls back, fingers briefly pressing against your cheek. “A month, I’ll be back,” he says, voice low in a way that feels like a promise, and as your eyes meet his, he doesn’t look away. The feeling is as piercing as a needle to your heart.

“One month. I’ll send a bat.” You reply, and the words feel like a confession. They feel heavy and strange in your mouth, unused as you are to making promises you intend to keep down here in the Neath. Promises are plentiful, carrying them out is anyone’s game, and while you always try to keep them, even you falter.

You don’t want to falter here. You want to match him step for step in whatever game this is, because underneath the lamplight his eyes shine like polished wood, hair slipping out from underneath his hat that your fingers itch to tuck back.

It would be easy to lean in and kiss him, reach out and touch him. You do neither.

“I’ll be seeing you, Wilmarth.” Melville says softly, before pulling away. Within minutes he’s gone, with only the lingering scent of his cologne to remind you he was ever there. You stand there for a few minutes, your lingering shreds of decorum all that keeps you from following him, following him and asking-

No.

You head back to your room above the bookshop, and set to work rifling through Melville’s notes. His handwriting is jagged but not necessarily messy, done in a style of shorthand that takes time to unravel but you pick it up quickly enough. The majority of them are clean-cut and to the point with clinical descriptions of the people who’ve approached him, clear dates as to when they met.

He has a discerning eye, and it gives you everything you need to start tracking down whomsoever is involved. You sink into work, and don’t remember the first time you look up from it. You try to keep your thoughts from straying towards that evening, and you do what you can.

*

Melville comes back.

He comes back just as promised, and your heart jitters, hammers against your ribs as your eyes rake over him taking note of the changes. His hair is longer, tied back in a lazy tail. There’s a pink still-healing scar curving down his jaw, strange circular marks wrapping around his exposed wrist as his shirtsleeve hitches up, and against all belief he still looks handsome. Ragged around the edges perhaps, clothes more worn through than before, but striking nonetheless. His glasses are cracked across one lens, and for some reason the sight makes your heart clench a bit.

You take a lazy drag off an ink-stained cigarette, resisting the urge to meet his eyes, but he still spots you anyways. Wears that wide lopsided grin as he moves your direction, cutting through the dock crowd without a second glance. His first mate shouts something, and he flicks the man a dismissive gesture before continuing forward.

The weight of his eyes on you burns like a flame, and you’re eager to burn as you stub out your cigarette on the wall.

“Mister Melville, it’s been a moment, hasn’t it?” You offer as neutrally as you can, voice casual and easy as smoke drifts from your mouth. As if you haven’t brawled just the night before with one of the tails sent to accost you, as if you haven’t started wondering what happened that night when he leaned into you. You’ve looked his notes over and over until the edges of them have gone soft from handling, absently wondering how he would describe meeting you.

“If honey dreams don’t count, it feels like years,” Melville replies, something oddly soft about the set of his smile now, and oh, _oh._ You had indulged in honey a few days ago, all the easier to make a few pennies for some other writer’s research, and the dream had been ephemeral, fleeting. Something you thought a mess of underlying thought, nothing close to real the second you surfaced from its depths, but the feelings had bled into the rest of the day.

A hushed conversation in the ruins of some coral and glim encrusted cathedral, reflections distorted in the pitch-black water you walked through. A subtle bleed-through to some hybrid of the Singing Mandrake and Blind Helmsman, where the laughter carried like smoke and the drinks were plentiful. You’d thought him a poet, this man with dark hair curling around his jaw, a wound across his cheek weeping black tar. A living figment, or some strange interloper in your dreams, you hadn’t questioned it. You hadn’t minded the fleeting closeness, the brushing of fingertips or the press of shoulders.

In fact, you wished they had lasted longer.

“...You were the wounded man?” You ask, words cautious and guarded. It wasn’t outside of the normal to have honey dreams collide, but it was unusual to speak so plainly of them. Your hands are trembling slightly as you lift the cigarette to your lips again, anything to keep yourself from saying something foolish. Something ridiculous like _I wish we lingered. Why didn’t you say anything? Why share a dream with me, of all people?_

Melville, Rich’s, smile flickers at the phrasing, but returns nonetheless. He shrugs, a quick jerky motion that makes his clothes look further rumpled on his frame. “Yes, I- that was me. This here was still fresh at the time, an’, y’know.” His hand flutters towards his cheek as if to touch the mark on his jaw, only to falter. “How we see ourselves, it carries over.”

“Well,” you say, voice quiet as you try to make sense of what’s been laid out in front of you. _In vino veritas,_ or however it goes when two people imbibe honey and are subsequently stripped bare. “Dealings with the Cheery Man, shared honey dreams, a natural philosopher’s mind but a poet’s tongue. You simply become more intriguing by the day, Rich.”

It’s the first time you’ve said his name out loud, letting it contain all the meaning you’ve held back previously. Rich’s replying grin, once more confident and at ease, fills you with the same feeling that a thread-worn memory of the Surface gives you. Love makes a fool of you, even now, but for once… You aren’t flinching back, trying to hide the feelings with decorum. It’s alright to feel things, even if you aren’t exactly used to indulging yourself like this.

“Sounds like you dug up some good stuff. Any interest in sharin’ a meal together?” Rich asks, voice light and airy. He tucks his hands into his pockets confidently, waiting for your answer.

“I’ll count It towards my payment, if you’ll call me Bertie instead.” You reply with an air of magnanimity, soothing the edge of your words with a slight grin, a tilt of your head. You gesture towards him with a gloved hand, an invitation, and he lets out a soft huff of a laugh as he moves closer. A curl of hair slips from behind his ear, and if your fingers shake slightly as you reach up to fix it, he’s kind enough not to say a thing.

If working with him against the Cheery Man sinks your chances of drinking at the Medusa’s Head, it will be a small price to pay for the warmth of him at your side, the weight of his arm hooked in yours.

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the playlist I made for this, which is both on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/26OQuYRzNU4fEZJdMnkT8t?si=zrk_lpqGRNOJ8ZpKSwIH_A) and [Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFTqXjT-MDRw31KH2rG5Qk_ESXT2qIxNH) because I am... ridiculous. The Youtube one has some of the covers I wanted to use on Spotify but couldn't, so there's not really a big difference in the tracklistings except Youtube has two more songs on it.
> 
> Bertie and Rich basically become crime husbands after this, with the both of them switching who plays the intellectual for cons, who's the muscle, etc. and lead a very good life together. Or, well, at least as good a life can be in the Neath. Bertie never quite gets over the dread of potentially losing his soul, and Rich never quite recovers from what happened at zee, but they make their way through it.


End file.
